I'd be delighted if the virus came back into play (surely Kottle's got a culture of it stashed somewhere, as he would have needed in order to make the vaccine he whipped up in that episode), but I don't think it will. I think the writers felt the wrote themselves into a corner with those bugs, and wouldn't be sad if we all just forgot they ever mentioned them.

I'd be delighted if the virus came back into play (surely Kottle's got a culture of it stashed somewhere, as he would have needed in order to make the vaccine he whipped up in that episode), but I don't think it will. I think the writers felt the wrote themselves into a corner with those bugs, and wouldn't be sad if we all just forgot they ever mentioned them.

As I recall, the key to deploying the virus successfully required A) Surprise and B) Cylon Resurrection technology. The Colonials are unlikely to achieve and A and nobody can achieve B. Chekov's gun has already be pulled, aimed and fired. Thanks to Helo, it missed and now can no longer be reloaded.

Though as far as plot points as yet undealt with, what about all that stuff with the dreams and the Opera House? Figure that particular gun's got a couple of bullets in it.

Well, other than the nuke-the-cylons-with-germs strategy, there was a second virus related strategy that also wasn't deployed... immunize the fleet against Cylons! Infect all human controlled environments with the virus. Does no harm to humans, and now no Cylons can come there, not even toaster models, as even they were made sick.

You could also permanently get the contingent of cylons currently riding you to go-away-and-die-now-k-thx-bye. The only thing the Resurrection Ship gave you was wider dissemination. Without that, you can still pretty effectively wipe out a local battle group and immunize the human population from the threat of close Cylon contact.

The more I think about it, the more it seems likely is that the "Earth" Cylons engineered the nuclear attack to generate the first models of human-like Cylons. I'm envisioning something like the Aum Shinrikyo, except that resurrection and immortality were actually *real* - most humans were just against it. The Cylon cult generated the attack to force humanity to become early adopters, as it were. The first Cylon Resurrection Ship was in orbit, ready to receive the souls of the chosen few, and store them in the data dump at the Eye of Jupiter, which is really just a sort of backup hard drive for human personalities.

The 'toasters' are just parallel/divergent evolution - humans went directly to the 'final five' models, then adopted the toaster models as sort of inbred relations. But this implications of this are that the Final Five and all the rest of the skinjobs weren't "evolved" from toaster Cylons, but created directly by humans on the original earth in one step.

While I would not put such knots and ties past Ron Moore, simplest explination, they're all Cylons, this is just a repeating program, destiny and fate and all that muckery is just hard-wired. And yet, their lives still mean something.

The Matrix (I know, I know) sort of did this, badly. The "architect" said that Neo was the latest in a series of "messiahs", a pre-planned element in the program, a known fault and that it would all happen again (his death, fall of zion) and again.

@orwellseyes - I'm betting that ether way one of us is right anyhow - either all humans are Cylons, or all Cylons are humans/human replacements.

What I like about my interpretation is that you don't have to assume the current Cylons are the only ones who made it off Earth - there may have been other factions. Furthermore, the original resurrection equipment, or new equipment from other factions, might still be present and operating on the planet.

What this allows for, interestingly, is the notion that anyone (or at least certain someones) who dies on that Earth gets resurrected. This would explain what Starbuck is really easily - she did crash-land on Earth, and died, but got instantly uploaded to the original Cylon resurrection facility, or the facility of the "good guy" faction. So she's a Cylon, but she's a new Cylon, freshly derived from a human.

Either way, though, I think it seems evident now that there's no way the toasters actually built the original skinjobs and just evolved into them in 40 years.

Let's keep one thing in mind, with regard to the "they're all Cylons" theories - they're able to distinguish via testing whether a being is a Cylon or a "human" - and that goes for the ancient Earth Cylons as well. It's certainly possible that the humans have some sort of partial Cylon ancestry, but at the very least, the biological makeup of Adama and Roslin and Baltar has to have some fundamental difference between that of the Earth colony (and, presumably, the current incarnations of the final five).

Personally, I think if there is a new Resurrection "Ship", it must be on Earth. The real one, I mean. =)

Heh, yeah, I've been thinking about that too - so was this Earth the real Earth? They've made a point of saying more than once the 13th Tribe Cylons found this planet and called it Earth. Always "Called it Earth". It seems a deliberately phrased thing, to introduce the wiggle room that maybe it's not the real Earth.

That is countered by the shot in the last episode before the hiatus, in which we clearly see a shot of the real Earth with familiar continents.

But, I don't recall any establishing shots of the planet they just found - leaving open the door that it isn't the real Earth.

I'm inclined to think that's not what they're going to do in this show, but I'd have to say they've certainly left some deliberate space for it.

You're right - the only time it was shown from space was at the end of the third season (a year ago) - and it looked pretty green to me at the time. I completely rejected the idea that this wasn't the real Earth at first, but I'm really starting to think there's something to this...in fact, I'm starting to think the real Earth might be Kobol. Was a specific reason ever given for why they left it in the first place?

Imagine if the Cylon 'resurrection' technology didn't actually depend on a new, manufactured body. Instead, the original 'resurrection' technology was a derivative of the jump engine technology: a la /Miracleman/, when a Cylon 'resurrects' it is using the kidnapped body of its counterpart from another dimension/timeline, mindwiping it and downloading its brain contents into it. The Final Five are dupes who were pulled through, but never mindwiped by being downloaded because their 'models' are missing or inactive. Starbuck is a dupe from a nearly identical timeline. The Final Five will face a huge moral crisis when the real secret of resurrection is revealed, and they must make the decision whether to embrace resurrection as murder.

Heh, yeah, I've been thinking about that too - so was this Earth the real Earth? They've made a point of saying more than once the 13th Tribe Cylons found this planet and called it Earth. Always "Called it Earth". It seems a deliberately phrased thing, to introduce the wiggle room that maybe it's not the real Earth.

If there is anyone out there who is old enough to remember the original series like I do , then they would remember that

the OG fleet encounters a ship of refugee humans far out in space, and in that story arc, they end up on an Earth like planet called "Terra", with advanced techology ( not as advanced as the colonists though - they had limited FTL drives ) and robots, but the planet was under the brutal control of a global Fascist government . People in the Galactica fleet were thrilled and happy that they thought that they found "Earth" - But at the end of the story arc, Apollo was told by a "Being of Light" that they had not arrived at the real Earth yet.

Now if Moore et all are taking parts of the old storyline elements and giving it a new twist, then I believe that Oddbill is on to something....